Ever thought about striking out on your own to become a "travailleur indépendant" or a freelance teacher in France? What are the steps? What are the advantages and disadvantages? Is it really for you? Read on, and we'll explore that together.

Saturday, July 14, 2012

I recently participated in a heated discussion on Facebook.
Luckily, the conversation is so far down my timeline that it would
probably take four hours of scrolling to find it, thus the identities of
those involved have been protected by piles of social-networking compost.
Rather than provide the details of the actual discussion, I've decided
to use a substitute topic:

The whole firestorm started when a teacher posted a rant on her Facebook page that the coffee machine in her office constantly breaks down. "This is outrageous!" she vented, "I can't teach properly without my caffeine!" Meanwhile the post collected "likes" and comments faster than ants on a watermelon. Several of those posting comments worked together in the same office. The majority of the replies were clusters of Yeah!, Word up!, and Agree! Other comments read: "We should complain to the administration about this!" "We should demand better working conditions!" "We should refuse to come to work unless the machine is fixed!"

Being the victim of office-coffee-maker breakdown myself, I sympathized with my colleagues. I posted a few suggestions to solve the problem that have worked for my institution in the past. More "likes" popped up along with dozens of, "Yeah! We should do that!"

A few weeks later, I sent an email to the teacher who posted the original rant, asking if the coffee maker got replaced. She reported that the lifeless appliance was still in her teachers' office and nothing had been done to fix or replace it. She threw in how unfair it was to work without coffee.

Strange, I thought. So many colleagues seemed to have banded together online to help. There were some good suggestions and it appeared as if the problem would be solved in no time flat.

Upon analyzing the comments from the conversation, I came to a cloudy-day realization: all the suggestions started with "We should..." None of them started with "I could..." or "I will..."

"We should..." are perhaps the two words in the English language that will guarantee the project won't get off the ground. This is what Maria Araxi Sachpazian beautifully calls "Rhetoric of Irresponsibility".

I work with some wonderful people who come up with some wonderful ideas. However, I hear "we should" almost on a daily basis. I've thus developed a reflex that fires off the following reply: "That's a great idea! Why don't you come up with a game plan to implement it? Let me know if you need help."

I encourage you all to try this. And be aware of when you (over)use "We should..." Consider changing it to "I could..." and see where it leads.

Author

Bethany Cagnol founded her own company in France which is to project management, training, and language skills assessment and enjoys organizing English Language Teacher conferences. She has been the Treasurer of IATEFL BESIG, on the IATEFL Conference Committee and is a past president of TESOL France. She has authored works for Cambridge University Press, Pearson and Cornelsen.
She has an MA in TEFL from the University of London and over 15 years of experience as a trainer in companies and in higher education establishments. Bethany delivers seminars to large groups, develops tailored, blended learning packages for companies and recruits talented trainers, translators, authors and editors to carry out major long- and short-term education-related projects.